Made in Dagenham
Adelphi Theatre, London WC2
3 stars

IN 1968, 187 women sewing machinists staged a walkout from the Ford Dagenham car factory after being downgraded from semi-skilled to unskilled status.

This seemingly insignificant incident, highlighting the wider issue of gender inequality in pay, had a big impact.

No car seat covers meant no cars and these women, joined by their sisters on Merseyside, stopped production for three weeks. A meeting with Barbara Castle, Labour’s Secretary of State for Employment in Whitehall, led to an apparent resolution.

The successful 2010 film of these events is the basis for this production but this is something of a hapless enterprise.

Musicals and class struggle are uneasy bedfellows, particularly when staged for a West End audience and, while there have been many successful musical political satires from Kurt Weil and Bertholt Brecht to Stephen Sondheim, the shoehorning of the Dagenham women’s landmark struggle for equal pay into the schmaltzy format of the typical musical fails to impact.

Directed by Rupert Goold, acclaimed for a remarkable musical staging of the darkly edgy American Psycho last year, it has some great scenes set in the Westminster of the Harold Wilson era and there’s a richly comic portrayal of the prime minister by Mark Hadfield, who provides a perfect double act with Sophie-Louise Dann’s Castle.

Dann completely inhabits the role as she sashays across the stage bantering with the women and she sings the only belter of the evening.

Yet Gemma Arterton as the lead Rita O’Grady does not match that commanding presence. Fetching as she is in her ’60s frocks, she’s also overshadowed by outstanding performances from Sophie Stanton as the foul-mouthed machinist Beryl and Heather Craney as her sidekick Clare.

The lyrics by Richard Thomas and writer Richard Bean are often funny and apposite but in some scenes sink into anodyne sentimental pap, as in the park bench scene between O’Grady and her husband Eddie where music and lyrics are cringingly awful.

All musicals demand a stand-out number but that is certainly missing here, with David Arnold’s score unremarkable in every regard — perhaps a few covers from the ’60s might have bucked proceedings up.

It seems that West End theatres and audiences can embrace a bit of class struggle as long as it is long past and packaged in happy-clappy musicals. I wonder if a West End producer would commission a piece about saving the NHS and whether the audience would be in the aisles singing “stand up” as they did at the opening night of this production?

I’m not holding my breath.

Runs until March 28, box office: http://adelphi.londontheatres.co.uk